Things bugging me about the udevgames.com site

1) the registration form doesn't state the password requirements, you're only informed after submitting the form if your password wasn't good enough.

2) why is "Address" a required field? No offense, but should the site get hacked, this is heaven for identity thieves. I can see it required for shipping prices, but that certainly doesn't apply to everyone.

3) the developer diaries as "forums" is absolutely unintuitive, and hard to read and navigate. They should be blogs, preferably with comments enabled.

4) all the placeholder udg 03/04 stuff is just getting in the way.

5) the home page's sidebar doesn't focus on the current contest either, and that cumulative stastics block is just plain misleading.

I know you have a lot to do, Carlos, but I also know this is so because you like to do everything yourself, so please fix some of this stuff to make udevgames.com less painful to use.

Quote:1) the registration form doesn't state the password requirements, you're only informed after submitting the form if your password wasn't good enough.

I can fix this. Will add to the todo

Quote:2) why is "Address" a required field? No offense, but should the site get hacked, this is heaven for identity thieves. I can see it required for shipping prices, but that certainly doesn't apply to everyone.

It's always a pain to get people's mailing address when I need it. It is strickly for shipping requirements. Keep in mind that with sites like WhoIs, most of you can be found these days.

Quote:3) the developer diaries as "forums" is absolutely unintuitive, and hard to read and navigate. They should be blogs, preferably with comments enabled.

I'm using the 'forum' system to contain the dev diaries. This is the best I can do for this year. Next year, I'll edit the templates so that they ppear to be more 'bloggish'

Quote:4) all the placeholder udg 03/04 stuff is just getting in the way.

Shall me deleted.

Quote:5) the home page's sidebar doesn't focus on the current contest either, and that cumulative stastics block is just plain misleading.

Shall be updated to focu on the current contest. The sidebars were just filler and proof-in-concet code blocks. I will also list out latst blog posts on the front.

Quote:6) as I just discovered, the email settings trick Safari into putting your nickname into the email field. Not sure if this can be fixed, but it's sure annoying.

Odd. I will check it out. I can change anyone's login/screen name should it wished to be fixed.

Quote:7) The Developers section does not link to each developer's games or diaries.

Carlos, I meant that the Developer section should probably be linking directly to that developer's entry this year if one exists. Sorting through posts is not as intuitive. It was a minor design point, not a functionality issue.

Seriously, that's monkey business. I am getting annoyed to no ends by the uDG site. Some developers want you to cross-post comments on the idevgames forums, some don't care, maybe we should make a completely separate forum for comments about the forums, wouldn't that make just as much sense.

No hard feelings, but the uDG forum is completely misconfigured, the inline images are just the tip of the iceberg, and dealing with all the crap takes away everybody's time that could better be spent working on the entries or whatnot. Oh yea, and for some reason, it's slow as molasses, as a little bonus.

I propose that the dev diaries are moved to an idevgames forum ASAP, that'd make everyone's life easier. There's absolutely no point for the dev diaries to exist on the uDG site, since they aren't tied in with the rest of the site in the first place. If it already has to be a bloody forum, then at least use one that works.

Another little bugbear - is it possible to enable links to the 'last unread post' at the topic title, like you can do on iDG. It's pain having to scroll through from the top of the thread (since some are starting to get a bit long now...)

I had some time to look further into the Dev Diaries section. It seems that some of the settings I setup were for general forum and not specific to the uDG 2008 board, thus I was confused by some of your remarks. For example, you'll now see an <img> tag available for inline images. Sorry about that.

I have sorted the post by most recent first, so looking at a thread will appear more 'blog like.' These are current settings:
Max Topics Per Page 25
Max Post Per Page 15
Topic Display Order = By Most Recent Post (or Most Recen First/Last)
Post Display Order = Most Recent First (was Most Recent Last)
Number of posts to indicate hot topic = 30
Maximum allowed characters per post = 10000
Display Edit Dates = No

The above are all the settings. I bumped img attachments to 150K and to 800x600 as well. By the way, you can get a RSS feed for just your thread. I will look into it.

Sorry for the delay, as I have been spending my time recovering from surgery. I hope to tweak the Dev Diary forum a bit more to make them appear more bloggish. Someone asked, "Why not use iDG's forum?" Quick answer is that I'd like to get rid of vBulletin down the road and simply use the built-in forum of our CMS (as we are doing on uDG.com)